CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss is bringing a conservative historian on board to contribute to the network she’s trying to save.
“I am here to make CBS News fit for the purpose in the 21 st century,” Weiss said at a meeting with staff on Tuesday, according to a script of her speech posted to social media.
The MAGA-curious boss went on to introduce new contributors, among whom is Niall Ferguson, 61, a British-American historian who has taught at Harvard University, where he is now a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
“I’m not going to stand up here today and ask you for your trust. I’m going to earn it,” Weiss told staff on Tuesday, before introducing Ferguson—whose Trump-aligned views appear to mirror her editorial direction—along with several other new contributors.
Ferguson will be part of Weiss’s additional 18 hired commentators— which also include “wellness bro” podcaster Andrew Huberman, New York chef Clare de Boer, and youth culture journalist Casey Lewis—in a move to “widen the aperture of the stories we tell and the voices we hear from” on the network.
During the meeting, she also celebrated the promotion of new CBS Evening News anchor, Tony Dokoupil, who raged against “elites” in a promotional video, claiming he would reflect the experience of his “mom in West Virginia” and not “academics.”
In her address to staff, Weiss made it clear that the “new CBS” will “be home for the hardest conversations and the boldest debates,” and the conservative historian seems to fit that bill perfectly.
Since 2024, Ferguson has been working for The Free Press, the digital anti-“woke” media outlet Weiss co-founded, which was acquired by Paramount Skydance last year.
His recent articles have focused on President Donald Trump, 79, including a piece arguing that he “won” and completely dominated at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, followed by another suggesting the president’s critics should show a “little more humility” in their opinions.
“Trump’s full-time haters are incapable of considering the possibility that, like any U.S. administration, this one might get some things wrong and some things right,” Ferguson wrote on Sunday, referring to a speech by Trump that was widely seen as a humiliation after the president confused Greenland with Iceland during a lengthy address before world leaders.
That emphasis on administrations occasionally getting things wrong was not evident in 2012, when Ferguson wrote a Newsweek cover story titled “Hit the Road, Barack,” arguing that then-President Barack Obama had broken nearly all of his campaign promises—a claim later disputed and fact-checked by commentators across multiple outlets.
In 2018, Ferguson again made headlines after inviting 30 white male historians to a conference at Stanford University. That same year, he resigned from a position at the university’s free speech program following the release of leaked emails showing the professor urging well-known Republican student activists to conduct “opposition research” on a left-wing student.
Weiss, who came under fire in December after canceling a segment about a notorious El Salvador megaprison housing deportees expelled from the U.S. under Trump—appeared during the Tuesday meeting to acknowledge that CBS News has struggled with public perception since her tenure as editor-in-chief began.
Ferguson’s hiring comes as NPR reports that layoffs are expected at the network, following cuts Weiss oversaw in October that resulted in more than 100 staffers being laid off.
“If that’s not your bag, that’s ok. It’s a free country and I completely respect if you decide this is just not the right place at the right time for you,” Weiss told staffers towards the end of her Tuesday address.
The Daily Beast has contacted Ferguson and CBS News for comment.
The post MAGA-Curious CBS Boss Taps Harvard Professor for Anti-Elite Makeover appeared first on The Daily Beast.
